The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

star of European education at the time was Friedrich Frobel, famous for his ideas of the kindergarten—a place where children would learn through play. Frau Dunkelblau, however, was a stern woman who felt that the currently fashionable dogma was totally reversed—that children should learn by suffering, not play. She developed her own method, which she called “Arbeit und Verletzung,” or “Work and Injury,” and employed it along with a very ambitious curriculum for her infant son, which she had determined would prepare him to enter a good Austrian university by the time he was twelve years old. In fact, Ernst Dunkelblau was accepted to the Karl- Franzens-Universitat, better known today as the University of Graz, at the prodigious age of ten.

Young Dunkelblau never graduated from the university, however. Rumors of the day linked him to a scandal with a much older woman, the wife of a university custodian, who claimed that young Dunkelblau offered her a florin to “nap upon her bosom.” Accounts subsequent to his death suggest that Dunkelblau never entirely overcame this troubling propensity for offering money to women not of his own family; in later years the significance of this weakness became so divisive among European Freudians that there were violent differences of opinion about it— indeed, there are reports of a famous fight in a London cafe between Otto Rank and Melanie Klein, in which Klein was said to have slapped Rank so hard and so often that he was led away weeping and for weeks would only see patients with a scarf draped over his face.

Much of Ernst Dunkelblau’s personal history between the years of 1871 and 1899 is hazy, little more than rumor and innuendo. It is known that he served briefly in the Austro-Hungarian army as a telegrapher, but was discharged because so many of his messages contained interpolated phrases such as “Ernst is scared,” “sleepy dumplings,” or simply the word “Mutti” (“Mommy”) typed over and over, none of which bore any relationship to the military messages young Dunkelblau had been tasked with sending.

Apparently, he also found time during these years to finish his education, graduating from a small university in Triesen, Liechtenstein, called the Todkrank-Igil Institute. Little more is known, because the university was subsequently burned to the ground by local villagers and its records lost.

Many of Dunkelblau’s later experiments in pedagogy, including the famous Meistergarten, seem to have roots in his Liechtenstein student period, because his adult writings on the subject of educational psychology frequently contain phrases, such as “two-schilling Vaduz Mustache” and “bloody Triesen pitchforks ouch ouch,” which seem to trace to this time.

However, with 1899 and his return to Linz, we see the triumphant execution of designs and ideas that had obviously been building in Dunkelblau’s mind for some time, culminating that year in the opening of the St. Agnes Blannbekin Private School for Boys and Girls, an institute under Dunkelblau’s personal supervision. The doctor was described by one of the school’s first students as “a great, smiling, bearded Father Christmas of a man” and “a performing bear, quick to growl, quick to eat off the plates of others, but also swift with a booming laugh or a sudden storm of tears caused by the frustrations of his work.”

In 1905, after some period of experimentation with mechanical equipment and the selection of a first set of human test subjects, Dunkelblau unveiled his magnum opus to the Austrian and international press: the Meistergarten.

John Coulthart’s painstaking reconstruction of the Meistergarten.

The Meistergarten

The machine itself was described in a subsequent legal deposition by a lawyer for the family of one of the children:

It was the size of a very small fairground ride, and, in fact, bore much of the appearance of a children’s carousel, being circular, a little less than three meters in diameter, and profusely decorated in the very ornamented style of the time with baroque leaves and vines. At the center, a bit larger than the human original it sought to emulate, was the bronze head that contained the speaking tube and the audio tubes and various other bits of the mechanism that would allow it to interact with the youthful subjects.

The machine itself (although most of the gears and tubes were hidden from view by the panels on the outside of the Meistergarten) was designed as both a teaching resource and a self-contained supply of everything by way of health and nurture that the child subjects would need. The bronze head that took pride of place at the center of the Meistergarten, perched much as a bride and groom might stand in the middle of a wedding cake, was created in the image of a classical sculpture of a goddess, but with a hinged jaw and small lightbulbs behind the isinglass of the eyes. It would turn on a swivel to listen or speak to the children in turn. A correct answer would solicit a mechanical smile (signaled by a grinding noise as the jaws rubbed together) and various invisible caresses on the student’s unprotected skin within the body of the machine. A wrong answer would cause the automaton’s eyes to flash red and its mouth to gape widely as it gave forth a loud klaxon that some observers called “horrifying,” but Doktor Dunkelblau called “usefully arresting.”

Other facilities for the better promotion of learning had been built into the Meistergarten but were not immediately revealed by the staff of the St. Agnes Blannbekin school.

The Subjects

“Die Beruhmten Funf,” or “The Famous Five,” as the first child subjects were known, had been handpicked by Dunkelblau himself because he felt they would be “uniquely susceptible” to this new kind of learning, which he sometimes referred to as his “Automatische Super-Mama,” but more often as simply “The System.”

The names of these first volunteers, or at least the names by which they were known in the literature surrounding the experiment, were:

Trudl K., 7 years old, from Linz

Wouter S., 9 years old, from Passau

Franz F., 8 years old, from Linz

Helga W., 8 years old, from Scherding

Lorenz D., 7 years old, from Radstadt

These students (or, rather, their parents) had agreed that they would spend at least the next three years as part of Dunkelblau’s experiment—joined to the apparatus, with all their needs satisfied by the machine while they received the most complete and thorough education of any human child ever. Or so was Dunkelblau’s assertion; the results of his groundbreaking experiment and the value of his data are still in dispute to this very day.

Some later researchers have claimed that Ernst Dunkelblau chose his subjects by nonstandard criteria that included “interesting distress noises,” “shape of feet and nose,” and, in one case, that of Helga W., because the young girl had “a tantalizingly brilliant future in Music or the Arts,” epitomized by her singing voice and early grace at the Austrian Boarischer, the polka, and other folk dances.

The Experiment

The name of Dunkelblau’s invention, Der Meistergarten, was a play on Frober’s famous “kindergarten”—a children’s garden. Ernst Dunkelblau, though, did not plan simply to educate children, but to create “masters,” students who would be superior to ordinary children in every way, as Dunkelblau had felt himself to be.

“I was a nightingale in a cage full of croaking ravens” is how he once described his time at the University of Graz. “My little, sweet, and sensible voice could not be heard above the cacophonous din of the other so-called scholars. . . .”

So it was that the Famous Five were “assigned to the System,” in Dunkelblau’s phrase, in September 1905 at his school in Linz. Completely immobilized by machinery from the neck down, the children were catheterized for waste disposal and fitted with feeding tubes that periodically pumped meals (a slurry of oats, root vegetables, and some meat products) directly into their stomachs. The inside of the Meistergarten device also contained a number of specialty appendages, which were not displayed to the children, capable of administering to their hidden bodies comforting pats and caresses as well as pinches and slaps.

The Meistergarten was then closed and the neck-rings sealed, so that all that could be seen of the subjects were their heads, all facing in toward the center of the circular Meistergarten, which was set in an otherwise empty, mirrored hall specially prepared by Dunkelblau at the St. Agnes Blannbekin school. Observers watched the experiment from behind the one-way mirrors lining the large room. From that moment on, the subjects had no other direct human contact. The machinery of the Meistergarten itself was serviced during the subjects’ sleeping period by silent custodial workers and mechanics dressed in black robes and hoods. If the children seemed restless on